Not necessarily living in another country, but a large part of the world, especially in industrialized countries, learns English. Neither regional nor national, but of course because it is the lingua franca.
How does this show anything? Yeah, if after years and years of low level war and displacement of political enemies and being de facto controlled by Russian troops you hold a referendum that is boycotted by all but the separatists, of course the separatists will win! But that is so far from any valid referendum that accepting it as such seems dubious at best.
Well, it's not like in France, so I don't see your point. Hospitals in Salzburg and Österreich can't treat emergency patients properly anymore for lack of capacity. Also year round numbers won't help you if the cases are clustered.
We don't have mandatory smallpox vaccines in Austria anymore, even though we had them in the past. I really see no way how these energency powers will stay.
I think you misunderstood his point, I think what he's saying is that even good back end devs are horrible at designing UI and you need different people with different specialisations on a team.
That's definitely true, but not the only important thing in such a comparison. Germans work only 75% of the hours Americans do per year, and a lot of that is cultural.
Outside of Manhattan this is unlikely, Paris is much denser than NYC and the difference in GDP or however you want to measure economic productivity is too small to make much of a difference.